The Generic Style Rules for Linguistics

The Generic Style Rules for Linguistics are a set of conventions for text structure (concerning use of italics, capitalization, formatting of footnotes, examples, citations, references, etc.) that should be uniform across the papers in a journal or the chapters of a book.

They are proposed here for journals and books in linguistics, in the same spirit as the Leipzig Glossing Rules and the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics references. From the perspective of linguists, there is no reason why different publishers or even different journals should opt for different styles. The Generic Style Rules attempt a balance between conventionality, functionality and simplicity, and they are very close to what most papers published by the two most prolific linguistics publishers (De Gruyter and Benjamins) practice anyway.

The Generic Style Rules for Linguistics are made available here with a CC-BY licence, i.e. they can be readily republished elsewhere (also with adaptations, if desired).